Have you ever asked yourself why is this happening to me? What did I do to deserve this? This is you seeing yourself as a victim to your life. Everyone has gone through difficult phases in their life, but you defeat yourself if you perceive yourself the victim.

Do you complain? Do you argue and fight every time you don’t get your way? Complaining in one sense shows a lack of gratitude. It also focuses you on negativity rather than on the things that are working in your life. It also indicates a lack of faith because you are forcing things rather than allowing people and circumstances the space to be the way they are until they are ready to be different.

These are all symptoms of seeing yourself as a victim because you are not getting your way. I understand the feelings of helplessness that cause us to behave in this way. However just know it will not change things around for you no matter how many times you engage in this behaviour, in fact it seems to keep things in place longer.

Have you ever forgiven yourself for the mistakes you have made? Do you often feel badgered by the thoughts in your head saying nothing you do is ever perfect enough? Making you feel like you constantly fall short of your own expectations? This is your mind making you feel like the victim to your own life.

You do not always get to choose what life situations come to you, but you are always given complete control over your reactions and your choices. In this we have only ourselves to rely on. So being aware of our reactions to our life circumstances is of vital importance, if we wish to stop seeing ourselves as victims to our lives and start playing an active role.The choices we make will determine future situations we face.

Where do we begin? In each moment there is a choice you exercise, whether that be a choice you like or not or a viable option to you or not, a choice does exist. Let’s say someone has been hurtful and mean to you, you can see yourself as the victim and start gossiping about the person behind their back, or you might be mean and hurtful back to them, or maybe you just replay what happened over and over in your mind. All these are choices from the perspective of you being hurt by someone and therefore being the victim. You take back control when you forgive them, or maybe you see how in the past your actions may have hurt them equally? Forgiving them and yourself is empowering yourself. You are not longer dwelling in hurt and pain and you have freed yourself from victimhood.

Life is a puzzle and when you start laying out the choices in front of yourself it might just make it clear to you that you do actually have more choices available to you, than you think you do. It also helps you to choose to focus on the positive options rather than negative one’s even though negative one’s allow us to wallow in self pity which can be of comfort in stressful times. However this is a deceptive stance to take.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and we are far far stronger than we know.